“Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch’s ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels but alas!.”

Brings [O’Brian’s] achievement to a new height.

Too much philosophy makes men mad.

I hear better with a pen in my hand.

Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.

That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O’Brian a Master of the Art.